Should We Subsidize Creativity?

October 05, 1990|By John Steven Paul, associate professor of theater and humanities at Christ College and director of the Valparaiso University Theater in Valparaiso, Ind. This is adapted from his article in The Christian Century magazine for Sept. 19-26. (copyright) 1990, The Christian Century Foundation; reprinted by permission.

One cannot attend a play, art exhibit or concert in Chicago these days without being proffered a form for lobbying Congress on behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts-a reminder that the debate over the role and future of the NEA continues and that the forum is widening. The extensive coverage of the NEA debate compels us to think about two subjects about which Americans have always felt deeply ambivalent: art and federal government action.

The National Endowment for the Arts is caught in the middle, attracting both doubts concerning art and artists and antipathy for paying taxes.

Congress established the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities in 1965. Since then the NEA has had a dual mission: ``to foster excellence, diversity and vitality of the arts in the United States`` and, second, ``to help broaden the availability and appreciation of such excellence, diversity and vitality.`` From the beginning, the NEA found the first goal easier to achieve. Broadening availability, so crucial to a tax-supported agency, has proved more difficult.

In a 1984 five-year planning document, the endowment repledged itself to enlarging the audiences for art through touring programs, arts-in-education, mass media and creative marketing strategies. In particular, the document cited the ``need for broader coverage of the visual arts in the national and regional media.`` Ironically, five years later media coverage of the visual arts has contributed to the NEA`s most serious crisis.

Critics of the NEA fall into three groups. The first group understands that art is concerned with the ``temporal and material realization of values,`` to borrow a phrase from H. Richard Niebuhr, and that as the agency that funds the promotion, dissemination and production of art, the NEA transmits values.

Some members of this group would prefer the government to keep itself entirely separate from any specific complex of values, unless of course those values were identical to their own. Art that transmits moral, political, social or even esthetic values in conflict with their own offends them.

Why should one have to support, through taxation, art that is offensive-blasphemous, obscene, unpatriotic, disrespectful, self-indulgent or just plain bad? Were only inoffensive art funded, federal funding would be acceptable, even desirable.

A second group might be called the free marketeers. Led by spokespersons such as Ernest Van den Haag of the American Enterprise Institute, this group believes that art should be supported by those who choose to enjoy it. Why should art that appeals to the few be underwritten by the many-without asking them?

A case in point is grand opera. According to the NEA`s 1988 annual report, the Chicago Lyric Opera received a grant of $141,000 for ``artistic, technical and marketing activities.`` Why shouldn`t Lyric`s patrons pay higher ticket prices to provide for their own artist divertissement? Or Lyric could reduce its expenditures.

A variation on this argument is that in these times of high deficits and an uncertain economic future, the federal government simply cannot afford to subsidize the arts. (The NEA accounts for $171 million out of a U.S. budget approaching $1 trillion.)

Supporters of the NEA echo the voices of its founders. In 1965 the endowment was the expression of executive and congressional leaders confident that the nation`s political, economic and military leadership of the Western world was secure. It was high time that the nation took its place alongside other great civilizations by providing for the arts. Twenty-five years later, one argument for the continuation of the NEA is that the European nations, whose cultures we admire, subsidize their arts and artists.

In our uniquely pluralistic and multi-cultural democracy, our art should spring from a wide variety of artists and flow to a wide and large audience of people all exploring their own cultural heritages. Only a government of the people, by the people and for the people can ensure that degree of

participation.

If, as Lyndon Johnson said in 1965, ``art is a nation`s most precious heritage,`` then creativity is an especially valuable national resource, and artists, like scholars and scientists, need special protection from the rigor of the free market.

The concern for the artist expressed in the 1965 legislation signaled the beginning of a new kind of relationship between the artist and society. For two centuries artists have found themselves morally, politically and esthetically at odds with the regnant middle class; to people in the great audience, on the other hand, the artist has seemed at best eccentric and at worst anarchistic and amoral. The movement that led to the NEA represented an effort to bring artists off the sidelines and onto the team that would settle the New Frontier. Once in the locker room, the artists would be asked, what can you do for your country?